Friday, May 11, 2018

Marx's BF Juncker wants the EU to replace the U.S.

He should reduce his consumption of ethanol

Cornell theses: Cornell University has adopted a new essential part of every thesis defense, a strip tease. An advantage of this setup pioneered by Letitia Chai is that the speaker can't be criticized for the length of sleeves of his suit, as I recently was. ;-) Well, Chai has previously had a similar clash about fashion preferences with her Prof Rebekkah Maggor (the surname means a moron in Czech).

As Mr Pánek wrote in the MF DNES daily (and The Invisible Dog), Jean-Claude Juncker is a classic Soviet apparatchik.

Aside from praising Karl Marx, the mastermind of the murders of some 100 million people, not to mention economic catastrophes in a third of the world (and this support is unsurprising, Pánek argues, because the EU is a giant cesspool created out of hardcore Bolsheviks as he shows using a dozen of examples – this kind of experience must clearly be viewed as an advantage within the EU), he likes special agreements with big companies, he places his friends to important chairs, he loves to kiss other politicians passionately, and he is a drunkard. Pánek apparently wanted to point out that Juncker is a clone of Soviet dictator Brezhnev.

At any rate, Juncker drank too much last night. He's got bills to pay, his head just feels in pain. He missed the bus and there'll be hell today. He didn't like Donald Trump's departure from the Iran deal, so this "EU leader" declared that that

The European Union has almost the same GDP as the United States. Its military strength is significantly smaller but one can imagine that this problem could be fixed within a decade. But there's a more serious problem. Despite some American blonde's views, Europe isn't a country.

It's not even a pseudo-country. It's not a uniform entity at all. Especially when it comes to geopolitical questions, European nations' attitudes are all over the place. Also, the European Union isn't a democracy.

You know, the current U.S. president is supported especially by the red states. The support by the blue states is lower. It was the other way for his predecessor. But the approval rate in the "hostile states" is still of order 40%.

Jean-Claude Juncker's approval rate in countries like mine is comparable to 10%. And if you reminded the people that he actually promotes the migrant quotas, the support would drop to 5%. He's a rather generally hated bureaucrat. How does he want to make any decisions that would be analogous to Donald Trump's? What does it even mean to talk about such matters?

Take the Iranian problem. Obama signed a rather lousy treaty with Iran. Some sensible people may still think it has improved the situation. Nevertheless, the treaty hasn't eliminated all tension between Israel and Iran, among other things. In fact, these days, Israel and Iran started to gently bomb each other in the Golan Heights. OK, unlike Trump, the EU apparatchiks want to continue their friendship with Iran.

An Israeli lawmaker has said that Europe has lost it by appeasing Iran. Various people will react in various ways. I don't want to pretend that my opinions are strong – I am surely not dreaming about a war with Iran.

But just imagine that this particular tension will grow big, and it very well could. Israel and Iran could start to fight. America is likely to support Israel. Will the would-be leaders in Brussels want to bring the nations of the European Union to the war – on Iran's side? Or, if you phrase it just a little bit differently, will Brussels want the European nations to fight against the U.S.? Can you imagine how insane such a decision would be?

Lots of countries such as my homeland consider Israel their most important ally in the region. Czechoslovakia provided the newborn Israel with all the weapons needed to protect its existence. After some decades in which we were gradually reshaped to comrades of Yaser Arafat, we started to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – although the process may stop after the consulate and a few organizations are moved. However, we could imagine to fight on Israel's side. But to fight on Iran's side?

The situation would be rather similar in Hungary.

The likes of Juncker must be completely disconnected from reality. He really imagines that he is seen as a sort of a European leader across the member states of the European Union – who may order democratically elected governments to do extreme things, perhaps even when it comes to their war activities in the Middle East. Well, you're nothing like our leader. You haven't been elected and you couldn't possibly be elected in any democratic procedure. You're a ludicrous arrogant drunkard who has, according to an overwhelmingly dominant opinion at least in our part of Europe, no clue about political questions that matter – such as Europe's immigration policies. Juncker probably thinks that next year, he may order the European citizens to celebrate Karl Marx's birthday, just like he did last week. Sorry jako, comrade, but you can't.

If you tried to behave as a dictator who thinks that he can determine whom the Czechs should fight against, you could very well walk in the footsteps of Reinhard Heydrich. This is not a threat, it's just a description of a possibility whose significant probability is a fact. We're not on your side, Juncker. It is extremely likely that if the disagreement became something like Trump-vs-Juncker, lots of nations like mine would actually be squarely on Trump's side. We're Europeans but that doesn't mean that we root for any unelected EU apparatchik. Why? Because we're European but you are really not. And we may prefer to be honorary Americans over Europeans, anyway. ;-)

Do you really misunderstand it?

Europe used to be the belly of the world but it's no longer one simply because individual European countries are extensively weaker than America (and also than China; and when it comes to the military strength, maybe also Russia); and the synergy between different parts of Europe is very weak. Of course if someone were an actual "European leader" who would enjoy the support across the continent, he could think of being analogous to Donald Trump. But no one like that exists.

Especially if we focus on the question of Islam, maybe one-half of the citizens of the EU member states could imagine Viktor Orbán to be their legitimate leader. But he would suffer from analogous problems with support and legitimacy in many nations of Western Europe that were recently brainwashed by some unusually efficient detergent.

There's just no meaningful, coherent geopolitical entity that could be called Europe or the European Union. We have very diverse attitudes to Russia, China, the Muslim world, and most of the other global topics, too. If a Mr Juncker tries to obfuscate these facts and behave as a dictator of a continent, it will lead to huge tensions and, as I mentioned, possibly the assassinations, too. You would have to be a lunatic, Mr Juncker, to keep on thinking about these matters even after your hangover is over, if it ever will be.

Incidentally, the Committee for European Affairs of the Czech Parliament has approved a resolution chastising Jean-Claude Juncker for his presence at the Karl Marx celebration. The document was penned by Mr Jan Skopeček (ODS) whom I know in person – congratulations, a good job. The Czech Christian Democratic Union – which belongs to the same club as Juncker in the EU Parliament – has denounced his speech and urged Juncker to resign.